The Result of University Cost-Cutting Measures . . .

the Plausible Deniability Blog takes up where the PostModernVillage blog left off. While you'll see many of the same names here, PDB allows its writers and editors a space away from financial strum und drang that torpedoed the PMV blog.

Sunday, June 10, 2018

To look out over a barren backyard in the middle of winter, contemplating crows.

To grumble at the idiocy of workplace rules, the stupidity of traffic, the vapidity of the political status quo.

To despair at a planet polluted and melting, the indifference of those in charge, the greed of those in power.

To, considering these, wonder if going on is really worthwhile, if contributing to them through our labor and social compliance is more morally right than to just stop living.

To do these things is to be unhappy.

But they are both common and widely pathologized.

It’s no wonder that the rise of a psychiatry of depression—indeed, of psychiatry itself—tracks parallel with the rise of industrial capitalism. Certainly, unhappiness precedes these social phenomena, but its one-to-one association with a medicalized illness is a product of how we now live, and a reification of it. The Lord of the Manor cared little enough about his serfs that their states of mind were all but immaterial; it’s probable he considered the serfs incapable of the kinds of depths and nuances of thought and feeling of those of his own class. But it bothers the modern master that his employees are not both compliant to his dictates and also happy about it. As with all other things, “employee morale” has simply become a reflection of the ego of the CEO.

The economy of the US has moved toward services and retail, and the imperative for the worker to always be happy has only increased. Customer service representatives at a call center are judged not only by the speed with which they dispatch customer complaints and the adroitness with which they upsell, but by the attitude with which they go about their work.

To be sure, they “represent” the company; increasingly, they are not the company. They are contractors or other easily-eliminated classes of employee. The company is merely a set of legal parameters. Loyalty and pleasure in one’s work for its own sake are expectations of the company, not something in which they feel the need to actually invest.

Like the Lord of the Manor, they want something for nothing.

But even if they did want something for something, it would imply that emotions, just like anything else worthwhile in this system, are essentially transactional, that, like your labor and your time, I can buy your emotions as part of a package deal. And the lower you are on the economic ladder, the less your happiness is worth, and the more important it is to maintain if you are to be employable at all.

The policing of emotions, then, the sanctions against unhappiness, are matters of economic necessity: you can’t afford to be unhappy. The market demands it.

If you’re poor enough or a person of color, your unhappiness is a positive threat, and the displeasure it causes a literal policeman can be taken out on your body with little or no consequence of the cop.

Fortunately, industry has a solution to our problem in the marketing of antidepressant medications—a quick fix for a population that has as its basic mode of living a series of quick fixes.

At this point, the prescription and monitoring of mood-altering chemicals has become the primary job a psychiatrist does. Insurance companies are happy to reinforce that model: 15 minute “med checks” are efficient uses of a psychiatrist’s time. If psychiatry is, indeed, the medicine of “the soul,” it seems what the soul needs nowadays is a pill, the strength of which is nudged this way and that every other month.

This is a system that, from the perspective of a consumer culture and a market-based economy, ought to make everyone happy.

Only it doesn’t.

We’re sicker, sadder, and more suicidal than we’ve ever been. And when the prescription drugs don’t work or don’t work well enough (statistically speaking, their effect sizes are fairly small), we’re turning more and more to street drugs—heroin and methamphetamine—to fight the depression and the inner pain that still wrack us day to day.

But perhaps my scope here is too narrow: Freud’s theories were built on the discontent of the Viennese middle classes of the 19th Century, mostly of their women, a class which expressed its values as a matter of how contented the household could be. Prior to that, in the US and England, Puritans had gone a long way toward waging war on emotions at large as signs of not being among the heaven-bound. The self-improvement we used to revere in the US was geared toward tamping down both sadness and joy. The former was once considered a sin; the latter a frivolity.

We’ve posited in the Declaration of Independence the right to “pursue” happiness. But now we’ll punish you if you achieve it in excess. And no concomitant right to be unhappy has been widely fought for. Indeed, our scientific community has no solid notion of what emotions are even for.

Sadness, like tears themselves, upwells within us, in unexpected places and unexpected ways. Sad songs, the blues and country, and sad images abound. Edward Hopper’s stark canvases have gained a massive following, and the crying emoji is just as popular as any other. People who would not be able to tell a Picasso from a pizza can easily identify a Hopper. And the same psychiatrist who makes his living waging chemical warfare on his patients’ emotions feels no compunction about indulging in the bluest of jazz.

As someone whose unhappiness has ranged from the merely sad to the existential crisis, I haven’t found unhappiness to be entirely bad. It is unpleasant, and it can be overwhelming. I’d be lying if I didn’t also admit that it has put my life and health at risk. But then, so can the drugs we take to combat it, the work we do that demands we deny it.

Moving through it, wrangling with it, and coming to terms with it can also be deeply satisfying.

If unhappiness exists for a reason, and its ubiquity would suggest that it must, it can help us to see that something needs our attention—something in the way we live, in our relationships with those we love, our orientation to the world we inhabit.

It only makes sense to be unhappy if we’re being abused or oppressed, if we’re dealing with trauma or constant pain. What doesn’t make sense is that we should blame the sadness for the sadness, that we should try to do away with the unhappiness itself instead of trying to change things if we can.

At the very least, the lassitude and disengagement that unhappiness can cause is able to lead us to deep reflection and taking stock, two things our productivity-obsessed culture considers wastes of time. It’s OK for you to express gratitude, of course, because you’re supposed to be grateful for your shitty lot in life, but purely and openly contemplative? Heck, no.

Monday, May 28, 2018

When one references
War and Peace, one does so in order to invoke a cliché. War
and Peace is the quintessentially long novel. It is known for
that and for nearly nothing else—certainly not as something anyone
would actually read.

In fact, the cliché
itself is really not about the length of the book; the cliché is about the
impossibility of reading it, and the disdain the speaker has for long novels.

For these reasons,
among others, I set out to actually read it.

I suppose people
hear the call to engage in physical challenges such as running
marathons to prove something to themselves (or others), or the call
to climb mountains “because [they are] there,” but I set out to
read War and Peace in order to try to restore reality to it.
For at least one living member of the species, it would become a novel
again.

Since you probably
won’t read it, here’s what you need to know from someone who has:

1. It’s good. For
the most part. It’s not the novel you’d think it should be at
least in part because novels weren’t what you now think they are
when Tolstoy wrote it. Hundreds of pages are devoted to the analysis
of the individual’s place in history and the minutiae of the War of
1812. The latter was of great importance to his expected audience,
and it might still be of interest to scholars of military history.
The former should be of interest to anyone with a pulse. But

2. no doubt all that
would annoy contemporary readers. I honestly have no idea what
contemporary readers want out of a novel these days. Apparently, they
want to be terrified by the prospect of a dystopian future. To me,
this seems silly given that the prospect of a dystopian present is
quite frightening enough. However,

3. it’s not a
“hard” read. There’s merely a lot of it there. Tolstoy, as is
typical of the great Russian writers, draws characters who are
detailed and complex, so if you put the book down for a while, it’s
easy to pick back up. Like with old friends, you may not recall every
detail of their lives since you saw them last, but you’ll always
remember who they are.

Few western European
writers create characters who are this fully realized. Perhaps
Dickens’ main characters, but he also populated his book with
caricatures in a way that Tolstoy never would. Even soldiers we meet
for only a few pages seem like real people we might know. In the US,
maybe Hurston Henry James, or Melville (at his best) were capable of
such things, as, perhaps, the greatest of the French.

4. It’s a romance,
historical novel, and philosophical treatise. And that’s probably
why it’s so long. The historical figures, including Napoleon
himself, as the other characters, come across as actual people. The
book’s philosophy, while I disagree with it, must be defended, and
the novel almost achieves that as well. To a degree, the characters
themselves might contradict the philosophy it seems to promote, but
perhaps Tolstoy intended that, pitting the lived experiences of the
humans against the cynicism and determinism of the narrator.

At any rate, it’s
ambitious. That’s in its favor overall, but it also means that
there is a lot for the book to do.

5. Reading it is
familiar if you’re used to 19h century novels and philosophy. Most
people these days aren’t, I guess, and maybe that’s why they
should read more 19th century novels and philosophy.

Reading War and
Peace will change your orientation to time, people, and thought,
and that’s a good thing. The thinking that most people are able to
do is severely compromised by the media they have chosen to consume.
We’re unable to think long thoughts because we seldom encounter
them. We’re distracted because we surround ourselves with
distractions. And consume media we do: popping tweets like we do
Skittles and gnawing video games like endless bags of chips. This has
reinforced our inability to think in a coherent way. We may have deep
maps in our minds of a million virtual adventures, but if we’re
unable to appreciate the lives of those we believe are not like
us—the Russians of 200 years ago or a Black laundress in the Jim
Crow South—maybe we’re wasting our time. Perhaps we’ve
“escaped” during the time we’ve played, but we haven’t really
prepared ourselves to make the world we inevitably re-enter a better
place.

Sunday, May 20, 2018

In some ways, the
arts and humanities are the only endeavors in which “lived
experience” has always been privileged. So it’s no wonder they’d
be marginalized or actually argued against in an essentially
technocratic age. But the arts and humanities are also what’s
missing from the current “job oriented” educational realignment.
These programs may prepare people for specific jobs (although that’s
questionable), but they do not prepare people for work in a future in
which the nature of specific jobs is constantly in flux.

That, however, is
not why we should keep them around.

The argument against
lived experience is also an argument for process over understanding,
the idea that through research and evaluation processes alone we will
be able to gather all of the data we need to make the decisions we
need to make. This is ridiculous; without “real life”
understanding of something, you can’t even create meaningful
criteria for evaluation. In this sense, the movement away from lived
experience is a power play by those in charge and their academic
lackeys to replace what they cannot control, direct understanding,
with what they can control, processes and policies—in terms Bakhtin
might use, to replace the novel with the epic.

This is the same
attitude that privileges supervisory structures and administrative
processes over the work itself, the executive summary over the full
report, the report over the voices from the field, the data over the
principle—if, that is, the principle is even addressed at all. It’s
the driving force behind dismissing all truly new thinking as
“theoretical” and all real world information as “merely
anecdotal.”

In this sense, both
“street smarts” and “book larnin’” are being marginalized
in favor of the kinds of evaluative processes that exist for the sake
of controlling the terms in which ideas are discussed (again, if
they’re discussed at all) and for the sake of reinforcing power by
those who already have it. “And we have the numbers to show it,”
or “researchers say” are statements that seem unassailable, and
so few question where those numbers come from or the assumptions upon
which their gathering and interpretation are based.

When we lose an art,
we lose a way of understanding the world. Consider that for a minute.
What other realm of human endeavor would allow itself to just die, to
be told by wealthy and powerful and supremely ignorant and
unimaginative people that it should simply go away, that there is no
place in the future for how it knows and what it has discovered? Yet
that is exactly what academic institutions and their rich donors are
doing to the humanities and the arts.

When its critics
level against the arts and humanities that they aren’t practical or
don’t prepare people for “the real world” or “real jobs,”
what these people are actually saying is “The only thing that’s
important is what I believe I can immediately sell,” or “The only
thing that has any value is what I believe the market wants.”
Nobody ever asks these same people to back up what they’re saying
or to defend the principles they’re using to make the claim. So the
debate about the value of the arts and humanities isn’t even about
practicality at all but about a very narrow view of what’s
important to human beings, a view that almost all of us accept
without question because it’s the view of rich and powerful people.
When the actual pettiness and ignorance of their position is
revealed, it’s easy, or at least easier, to see why it is wrong,
yet because of the positions of those who share this view, we are
still collectively afraid to confront it.

So we try to justify
what we already do as preparing people for jobs, as having practical
components. We repackage arts programs as graphic design, drop studio
arts majors for career programs in video game design, shrink studies
of poetry for badges in advanced tweeting. Some of this has merit:
studying the arts and humanities will make you a better communicator,
and it will improve your critical thinking skills. When you see, as I
have, respected scientists making basic errors in logic, when you see
tech company executives utterly unable to imagine the negative
experiences of their users much less dystopias they are busy
creating, when you see presidents unable to understand why calling
immigrants “animals” is wrong, you can begin to see why these
people might need a few more novels and poems and paintings in their
lives.

But the value of the
arts and humanities is inherent, and that’s not something those
currently in power, who understand “value” only in the most basic
of monetary terms, can even begin to understand.

When we look back at
the great cultures of antiquity, we don’t marvel at their
technology except in the most patronizing of ways, amazed at what
such “primitive” people could accomplish. But when we read their
literature, when we hear their stories, meditate on their holy writ,
when we analyze their design and witness the world from the
perspective of their visual art, we experience something that a
patronizing attitude never could: recognition, an understanding of
the experiences they, and we, live every day.

When we encounter
their art, their literature, their philosophy, we recognize something
that we can learn from: we learn more, and more deeply, about being
human. And that is continually new.

Monday, January 1, 2018

The primary source
of violence in human affairs is when one’s existence comes up
against another’s set of purposes.

The culture of
stupidity of our leaders has been very carefully cultivated by their
benefactors.

Be open to
everything language has to offer.

We have more
invested in the reiteration of our own sanctimony than in alleviating
the suffering of other people.

As useful as it is,
research can also be a form of numbing.

We try to keep the
facts on our side, as if that will protect us, somehow, from all the
deep hurt.

The facts are
inadequate for our purposes however vital they may be for our
self-confidence.

The fundamental
problem of human progress is and always has been that those who
already have the power to change society owe that power to the status
quo.

The truth is that
there is no end state, no outcome, only the temporary cessation of a
task, the momentary manifestation of a phase.

The internet and the
worship hall have this in common: they are where we go to have our
assumptions reinforced.

When your sense of
hope relies on another’s despair, you’re doing it wrong.

Education isn’t
learning facts about things; it’s using ideas in order to learn
what to do with facts about things.

A tradition is a bad
idea that refuses to die.

You develop a taste
for ideas the same way you do for art, music, literature, fine food.
This taste can—and should—be cultivated as a matter of becoming
an educated person. If not, you’re not really engaging in your
education, formal or otherwise, no matter what you may call it.

Character isn’t
about always doing the right thing; it’s about having the humility
to learn and change from having done things wrong.

There is a certain
type of professional who always takes care to move the experiences of
those he serves out of the equation in order to make room for his own
ego.

One reason we don’t
change is that, while failure can garner sympathy, change can
threaten identity.

Businesses are fine,
and we may even need them. But they’re not enough. The main
business of a democracy must always be equity.

Framing government
as a business and the taxpayer as a customer is misleading: in order
to achieve “the general welfare,” we must see government as a
means to create a common good, and our duties as citizens as
contributions to a society worth living in.

We’ve been taught
that tears are punishment for being sad. They’re really what we’ve
earned for the privilege of being human.

It’s possible that
the idea of a comprehensible universe is an artifact of the human
mind, a necessary folly, a reassuring delusion masking fretful,
cosmological chaos.

Poetry is primary
research into what’s most basic and irreducible about being alive.

Privilege is the
power to give your personal fears the force of law.

Our very systems of
sorting and ordering data create both insights and cognitive
impairments. We tend to forget the filter is there and take to
assuming the world really does align with the tools we use to study
it.

We’ll recover from
the lies, but we’ll never fully recover from all the lying.

It’s a strange
quirk of Western thought that the past is seen as the child of the
present and the future as the father of now. A more accurate picture
would reverse this order. The past, rather than being “primitive”
or “innocent,” creates the world we’re emerging into, frames
what discovery means for us, and is the very vehicle of all our
current explorations.

The thing is the
thing; the system is cognitive.

Good literature
makes you think and feel; great literature changes the manner in
which you think and feel.

For the competitors,
the purpose of competition within a market is not to innovate or
create efficiencies—still less is it to create jobs. The purpose is
to win market share. In other words, the purpose of competition, no
matter its means, is to reduce competition by reducing the number of
competitors.

There are two ways
to experience change: go somewhere or stay put.

Maintaining an
identity is more important than addressing an injustice that does us
harm.

A successful system
of hierarchical power succeeds by rendering evil banal.

I often hear people
excuse not reading poetry by claiming that they do not understand it.
Do they really think they’ll understand it better by not reading
it?

Problematic are not
the questions you can’t answer but the ones you can’t ask.

We should first
admit that we can’t possibly understand another person’s pain.
But then we should do all we can to make space for it.

It’s funny with
madness: the sane will ask “why” not because they want to know
but because they want to be seen as the sort of people who ask “why.”
The mad ask expecting an answer.

Contemporary
conservatism: society exists to produce goods for an economy.
Classical liberalism: an economy exists to produce goods for a
society.

An irony: we feel
safe within our own spheres of fear.

The expert, the
businessman, th evaluator, the executive are motivated by what they
know. The scholar, the artist, the scientist, the philosopher are
motivated by what they do not know. This is why our current rush
toward business models and toward reliance on existing evidence bases
is so pernicious to the university, to creativity, and to science. We
have subjugated scholarship to service delivery, artistry to
marketing, science to research and evaluation.

Analytical
spellbinding: the idea that a clever analysis equates with a complete
understanding.

Analytical hegemony:
the projection of an analysis or analytical framework into the world
as an intervention or the solution to a problem.

The point of
ambition is power, but art is impossible without humbling oneself to
the task at hand.